Hope you enjoyed last night's films introduced by Ben Mankiewicz and Warren Beatty repartee... Ben asked all the right questions (that Beatty probably approved beforehand), and I can't recall ever seeing Warren Beatty so relaxed in front of a camera with a journalist asking questions about his career, personal life, or creative endeavors. Beatty is promoting his new film, and has appeared at the TCMFF to chat about his award-winning film, "Reds," after a screening of the epic about journalist Jack Reed (the only American to be buried in the Kremlin) and Diane Keaton (Beatty's current love interest during the filming of "Reds" and co-star portraying journalist Louise Bryant). Louise Bryant's papers have been found in a trunk and are now at Yale University.

Whenever I start watching "Reds," it's almost like a homemade chocolate chip cookies. I can't stop. I have no control. I have to watch the whole film because it's so engrossing. And Jack Nicholson, as Eugene O'Neill, is another trainwreck in that epic that no viewer should dismiss.

Amazing how relaxed Beatty was with Ben.

KEGOT Rita Moreno has just been on CBS This Morning chatting about her new Netflix series, a reboot of Norman Lear's "One Day At A Time," and her autobiogrphy, and Moreno told Gayle King to "Read the *&%&" book. If you had done your homework..." after she asked a question about her 8-year-long affair with Marlon Brando. Moreno claimed Brando almost killed her because of his powerhouse persona and wandering ways. Then Moreno went over to Charlie Rose and sang him "Happy Birthday!" Moreno appeared at last year's TCMFF to intro "The King and I" and sign copies of her memoirs....

And who isn't still waiting for a TCMFF 2017 update? Will it be today? It's precisely the kinds of guests like Warren Beatty and Rita Moreno who make the TCMFF such an exciting event...FYI: Alec Baldwin did the honors of interviewing Beatty in 2011 at the fest, as I recall....

Ok, home office in Atlanta. The marketing emails about Fathom events, the Shop TCM! discounts, The TCM Wine Club, TCM Backlots, Filmstruck, #MovieNightMenus, etc. have been read. Time for some real news about the TCMFF 2017 now, kids....

November 10 of 2016 was the date LAST YEAR when we heard of six of the films to be screened at the TCMFF 2016.This year, it is TWO months later than last year, and all we have is a theme.....#JustSayin'

We've got The Bog (Peter Bogdanovich) and "What's Up Doc!"We've got Genevieve Bujold and "King of Hearts!"Wonderful Kate MacMurray returns to introduce her father's film with Claudette Colbert, "The Egg & I!Read all about it!

"The fest also will showcase several world premiere restoration screenings, anniversary screenings and live music events.Oscar nominees Peter Bogdanovich and Genevieve Bujold will be among the honored guests at the 8th TCM Classic Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The fest will take place in Hollywood April 6-9.

Bogdanovich, the legendary writer, director and film historian, will appear at screenings of his films The Last Picture Show (1971) and What's Up, Doc? (1972), while Bujold will introduce the U.S. restoration of King of Hearts (1966) in which she stars.

Also in attendance at the fest will be Kate MacMurray, the daughter of the late actor Fred MacMurray, who will be part of the festivities surrounding the 70th anniversary world premiere of a restored version of her father's film The Egg and I (1947).

Other special offerings include world premiere restoration screenings of The Court Jester (1955) and, in 3D, Those Redheads From Seattle (1955); 75th anniversary screenings of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and The Palm Beach Story (1942); screenings of pre-Code classics The Front Page (1931), Red-Headed Woman (1932) and Twentieth Century (1934); and two special presentations: The Great Nickelodeon Show and Beyond the Mouse: The 1930s Cartoons of UB IWerks.

Additionally, there will be special live music events: the Alloy Orchestra will return to the fest to accompany a screening of the Harold Lloyd classic Speedy (1928), while composer-musician Stephen Horne and musician Diana Rowan will accompany a screening of Stella Dallas (1925).

Additional events and guests will be announced by the fest in the coming weeks and months."

I have all my LA plans ready and am just waiting to jump on the plane.Roosevelt - here I come and I have my Spotlight Pass awaiting to be picked up.We'll initiate the Festival with a nice dinner Wednesday night and then a Premier and Vanity Fair party - can't wait!! Will miss Theresa & Joe but we'll all toast them - - a few times, I'm sure!!!

Rogert Ebert revisits the timelessness of "The Last Picture Show" in 2004. From RogerEbert.com:

"The best scene in "The Last Picture Show" takes place outside town at the "tank," an unlovely pond that briefly breaks the monotony of the flat Texas prairie. Sam the Lion has taken Sonny and the **** boy Billy fishing there, even though, as Sonny observes, there ain't nothing in the tank but turtles. That's all right with Sam: He doesn't like fish, doesn't like to clean them, doesn't like to smell them. He goes fishing for the scenery.

"Try one?" he says, offering Sonny the makings of a hand-rolled cigarette. And then he begins an wistful monologue, about a time 20 years ago when he brought a girl out to the tank and they swam in it and rode their horses across it and were in love on its banks. The girl had life and fire, but she was already married, and Sam even then was no longer young. As he tells the story, we realize we are listening to the sustaining myth of Sam's life, the vision of beauty that keeps him going in the dying town of Anarene, Texas.

The scene has a direct inspiration, I believe, for the writer-director, Peter Bogdanovich. I'm sure he was thinking of the monologue in "Citizen Kane" (1941) where old Mr. Bernstein remembers a girl with a parasol who he saw once, 50 years ago, and still cherishes in his memory as a beacon of what could have been.

Sam, played by the veteran Western actor Ben Johnson, is the soul of Anarene. He owns the diner, the pool hall, and the Royal theater, and without those three places, there is no place to go in Anarene except to bed, which explains the desperate and lonely adulteries and teenage fumblings that pass for sex. Among those who treasure Sam the Lion are Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), co-captains of the local football team, which is so bad the local men look at them in disgust and shake their heads.

Bogdanovich's 1971 film, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, opens on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1951 -- the eve of the Korean War, and the beginning of the end for movie houses like the Royal, where Sonny grapples in the back row with his plump girlfriend Charlene (Sharon Taggart), while enviously watching Duane kiss the town beauty, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). On the screen are classics like "Red River" and "Wagonmaster," which speak to the legends of this land, but already the ugly little black and white sets in local living rooms are hypnotizing the locals with "Strike It Rich!" and other banal trivialities that have nothing to do with their lives, or anyone's lives.

It always seems too hot or too cold in Anarene. A wind blows down the deserted main street and in through the door of the pool hall. Sam the Lion hunches his shoulders into his sheepskin jacket. Bogdanovich and his cinematographer, Robert Surtees, use a lot of horizontal pans to show the town hunkered down flat against the land; we have the feeling that emptiness surrounds these weathered buildings.

Duane and Sonny presumably have homes to go to, but their lives center around their cars -- Sonny's old pickup and Duane's like-new Mercury. In high school., a valiant English teacher (John Hillerman) reads from Keats that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, but truth and beauty seem remote from their lives, and the most wonderful thing that happens to Sonny is that Ruth (Cloris Leachman), the 40-ish wife of the football coach, takes him to her bed and treats him fondly. Duane, meanwhile, is toyed with by Jacy, who has her eyes on a rich kid in a nearby city and isn't above getting an invitation to his pool party by leading on the local goofball Lester (Randy Quaid).

Jacy's parents are what pass for rich in the town, and her mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn) is still pretty, although she spends too much time drinking on the sofa next to her TV-mesmerized husband. Lois is at least a realist, advising her daughter to sleep with Duane so she'll find out it's not as great as she thinks it is. Lois sometimes sleeps with one of her husband's oil hands, but like Ruth, she places no great faith in sex and yearns instead for tenderness and conversation and someone who has not been defeated by life.

When "The Last Picture Show" opened in 1971, it created a sensation. I saw it on its first engagement in New York, where audiences crowded in with the eagerness reserved, these days, for teenage action pictures. It felt new and old at the same time. Bogdanovich, a film critic and acolyte of Welles, shot in black and white, which gave the film a timelessness, then and now. He used a soundtrack entirely made up of pop songs, which was something new (Scorsese had tried it with his first film, in 1967). It was mostly Hank Williams who provided the soundtrack for these lives, and Bogdanovich used real sources in the scenes for the music -- radios, jukeboxes -- where "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)" commented directly on the action.

We had not seen these faces before, except for Ben Johnson and a few other supporting players. Like "Citizen Kane" by his hero, Bogdanovich made a film introducing future stars. Cybill Shepherd was in her first film. Tim Bottoms was in his second but spent his first, "Johnny Got His Gun," as a soldier who could not see, hear or speak. Jeff Bridges had done nothing memorable, and Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn caught fire with their roles here. For Leachman and Ben Johnson, who for years gave dependable support in the John Ford stock company, there were supporting actor Oscars.

The film has an unadorned honesty that came as a jolt after the pyrotechnics of the late 1960s. While the "Easy Rider" generation was celebrating a heedless freedom, Bogdanovich went back to the directness and simplicity of Ford, who he admired no less than Welles. But "The Last Picture Show" took place long after the heroics of "Red River" and the other classic Westerns. It was based on the first of many novels where Larry McMurtry (whose hometown of Archer City, Texas, supplied the location of Anarene) charted the Texans who came after the age of heroes.

Seeing the film once again, I was struck by how many of the scenes involve sex, and how little they involve eroticism. Cybill Shepherd's celebrated striptease on a diving board got a lot of attention at the time, but her character coldly uses sex as a way to get the best deal she can out of Anarene. The only real warmth comes from the Leachman character, Ruth, combing Sonny's hair while they're both fully dressed.

There is simply no way in this town to touch life and glow. The last ones who knew the secret were Sam the Lion and maybe Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), the waitress at Sam's diner. Sonny and Duane, we suspect, will grow up to drink too much, work too hard and marry desperate women -- unless Duane is killed first in Korea. There is certainly no future for gentle Billy (Sam Bottoms), who always smiles but has no reason to.

The film is above all an evocation of mood. It is about a town with no reason to exist, and people with no reason to live there. The only hope is in transgression, as Ruth knows when she seduces Sonny, the boy half her age. And then he, too, falls briefly under the spell of Jacy, leading to the powerful scene where he returns to Ruth and she hurls the coffeepot against the wall and spills out her soul. (Leachman did that scene in one take, first time, no rehearsal.)

At the end, Bogdanovich shows us brief moving shots of his stars, with titles giving their names and characters. This is a reminder of Welles' credits at the end of "Citizen Kane." In 1971, those played simply as effective titles.

Today, seeing Bridges, Bottoms, Burstyn, Leachman, Brennan, Quaid, Johnson (who died in 1996) and the others 33 years later, the images in the credits have a sharp poignancy. There is a line from "Citizen Kane" that comes to mind: "I was there before the beginning ... and now, I'm here after the end."

Bogdanovich was there after the end, too. In 1990, he gathered most of the members of his original cast for "Texasville," a sequel set in the early '80s, some 30 years after the period of the original."

How wonderful it would be if Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Bogdanovich, Cloris Leachman, and Ellen Burstyn appear at the festival to celebrate this film. Here's hoping!

Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold will be in attendance at the TCMFF 2017 for 1966's King of Hearts.

"Set during World War I, this French cult classic comedy starring Alan Bates and Geneviève Bujold follows a young Scotsman trying to find and diffuse a bomb in a town overrun by lunatics. This film is presented in a special 50th anniversary North American premiere restoration in collaboration with Cohen Media Group’s Cohen Film Collection."

And learn "All About Genevieve" from the set of a film from 2013, Still Mine:

The latest news on Variety for film lovers, bloggers, the lonely and bereft, and historians:

"Blame the trolls: IMDb, the Amazon-owned website that provides movie, TV and celebrity content, has decided to shut down its message boards because they’re “no longer providing a positive, useful experience” for the vast majority of its users."

Glad we still have The Silver Screen Oasis, and a few other places....

Read the all the sad news here: [url="http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/imdb-message-boards-shut-down-1201977581/"]http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/imdb-message-boards-shut-down-1201977581/[/url]

TCMFF UPDATES: None to report this week.....

Since a tribute to Peter Bogdanovich is part of the fare this year with screenings of "The Last Picture Show" and "What's Up, Doc," maybe he might be our TCL Chinese (Grauman's) Hand and Footprint Ceremony Honoree.....